I got a new flat panel today (woo!) and I'm thinking of running dual monitors with my old one through VGA and the new one through DVI. This way I can game and look at topless photos of Ms. Portman AT THE SAME TIME.
My question is: Will this seriously hamper the performance of my machine while gaming?
My measurements:
P4 2.5
Radeon 9600
512 RAM
Dual Monitors - Gaming Performance
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GreenGoo
- Posts: 42349
- Joined: Thu Oct 14, 2004 10:46 pm
- Location: Ottawa, ON
Think of it this way. Game performance is a function of video card power and system power (I use the word "power" for simplicity). The video card is driving a single monitor and the cpu is feeding info to the card as well as handling all non-display related calculations.
So throw in a second monitor. The video card has to drive 2 monitors and the system has to track calculations for both the game and the second monitor.
So....for any cpu or video card intensive game, you will see a drop in performance if you are running dual monitors. How much of a drop depends on how much the game was taxing the system before you went dual.
I'm running dual right now on an AMD XP 1800+, ATI 9800 Pro and 19" and 17" LG monitors.
Since my system isn't up to snuff, yes, I suffer a decent performance hit on some games. I wouldn't try any modern FPS for example.
That being said, I ran WoW beta in maximized window mode on the 19" and surfed on the 17" with no real problems.
Um, *cough*.
What I meant to say is that, yes, you will see a performance hit. How big depends on what the rest of your system looks like and the apps you are running.
So throw in a second monitor. The video card has to drive 2 monitors and the system has to track calculations for both the game and the second monitor.
So....for any cpu or video card intensive game, you will see a drop in performance if you are running dual monitors. How much of a drop depends on how much the game was taxing the system before you went dual.
I'm running dual right now on an AMD XP 1800+, ATI 9800 Pro and 19" and 17" LG monitors.
Since my system isn't up to snuff, yes, I suffer a decent performance hit on some games. I wouldn't try any modern FPS for example.
That being said, I ran WoW beta in maximized window mode on the 19" and surfed on the 17" with no real problems.
Um, *cough*.
What I meant to say is that, yes, you will see a performance hit. How big depends on what the rest of your system looks like and the apps you are running.
